Fraud Prevention Month | Stewart Title

March is Fraud Prevention Month & we’re spreading the word!

This important government initiative recognizes that preventing fraud is a significant goal for all parties involved in real estate transactions.

For a legal professional, being unknowingly involved in a title fraud can be stressful. An inquiry can consume time, incur costs and affect the firm’s reputation. As your trusted partner in this process, we don’t want to see this happen and are here to support you and protect your central role.

Specialized Verification Team

The Underwriting and Verification Teams at Stewart Title are in place to review and analyze relevant details of real estate transactions to identify potential indicators of title fraud. These teams work together with legal professionals to help prevent tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent and suspicious transactions from proceeding each year!

Fraud Prevention Process

At Stewart Title, our Fraud Prevention Process is designed to specifically identify real estate transactions that contain possible indicators of title fraud.

Each real estate transaction we see is subject to a series of fraud prevention questions which can be the difference in avoiding a fraudulent transaction. The effectiveness of this process saves legal professionals substantial time and costs that can be brought on from the scrutiny of a law practice’s involvement in facilitating title fraud.

The Role of Title Insurance

Real estate title fraud can cause catastrophic losses to homeowners who are left to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend their title and lenders who can potentially lose out on the full amount of their mortgage.

Title insurance can protect both homeowners and lenders against losses resulting from many forms of real estate title fraud via residential owner, loan and existing owner policies.

Remote Signing Endorsement

To alleviate concerns about accepting the remote signing or mortgage documents during the pandemic, we proudly introduced our Remote Signing Endorsement in 2020.

This endorsement is automatically attached to policies at no additional cost and confirms to lenders that Stewart Title does not require face-to-face meetings or wet signatures as a precondition to obtaining title insurance during the current pandemic - and that we will not deny liability under the policy, or any endorsements issued with the policy, on the grounds that the Insured Mortgage was signed by the borrowers remotely.

Download our Fraud Prevention Guide!

To assist your office with identifying potential title fraud indicators, we have developed a downloadable fraud prevention guide. This guide provides insight into our fraud prevention measures as well as other tips and indicators to be aware of when handling your real estate files.

We are please to offer a special selection of fraud awareness webinars throughout the month to assist legal professionals identify and mitigate some of the risks that can arise as part of a real estate transaction.
Each CPD accredited* session is one-hour in length.

Register Today!

A new one-hour panel discussion which examines the key Red Flags to be aware of
when acting on real estate transactions along with a review of recent cases and trends.

9am PST / 12pm EST